WordPress 4.0 Arrives!

WordPress 4.0 was released last week and shows numerous improvements and tweaks, which the developers hope will give users a ‘smoother writing and management experience’. We’ve got the rundown on what you can expect when you update to the new release.

Known as ‘Benny’, in reference to the American jazz musician Benny Goodman, WordPress 4.0 has been dubbed by Matt Mullenweg as WordPress 3.9 after the team have ‘put a little extra polish into it’. Bearing this in mind, there aren’t huge changes and this certainly isn’t a major release, though there’s enough here to get excited about.

Manage your media and embedded content with style

Uploads are displayed in a beautiful, endless grid and a new details preview makes viewing and editing any amount of media easier than ever.

The content-editing experience is better than ever

WordPress 4.0 delivers embeddable content previews right there in the visual editor, which will now expand to fit your content, making things much more user-friendly

Better workflow for finding and installing plugins

This new release has simplified the quest for the perfect plugin, featuring new metrics, an improved search function and a more visual browsing experience. Now it’s simpler than ever to find the plugin you’re looking for in a directory of over 30,000 free and open source plugins.

But wait! There’s more… Before we go, we’ve picked out a few more highlights:

Image previews now support .bmp files

The colour picker has been re-added to the visual editor

A ‘Bulk Select’ button in the Media Grid allows users to delete multiple items at a time

While there aren’t any major new features, the tweaks here and there are going to make life a lot easier for WordPress users and are all extremely appreciated. What makes WordPress 4.0 even more impressive is the short time it was turned around in. Six months after we welcomed 3.9 and we’re already enjoying a new release – maybe that’s something to do with the 275 contributors who were involved with 4.0, a new record!